by Nick Lake
Anyway.
Anyway, today, they’re coming over for lunch. For the very first time. I mean, we’ve had meetings. That sounds formal … and they kind of were, actually. Getting to know each other. Usually with an interpreter. And Jennifer wrote me a letter. It said all kinds of stuff—sad stuff, happy stuff. Love that I can’t reciprocate yet, memories that I don’t share.
But then, at the end, it said:
We only thought about ourselves. How badly we wanted you back, how much we loved you and missed you. We weren’t thinking about you, about what you needed. I’m sorry.
And I cried until I couldn’t see the page.
This evening, it’s the first time with Victoria and Richie. The others, the older ones, I’m not meeting till Christmas. I’ve said that I’ll go to Alaska for the holidays. James is back in Paris. He’s pissed at me, I think. It’s understandable. But I’ve written to him. I talked about how much I love the expressionists, which is his special field of study.
I’m hoping he’ll write back.
But Victoria and Richie live with their parents—they couldn’t stay with the grandparents forever. So now they’re down here, in Arizona, for the week. Tomorrow we’re going to the desert. Richie wants to touch a cactus and find a lizard, says Jennifer.
A red light set into the wall turns on—it’s what tells me that there’s someone at the door. This whole place has been set up for me.
As I pass the TV, I see that the weather is on. The announcer is pointing to a map, where something swirls grayly over the coast.
The closed captions say:
As the cold front sweeps up the eastern seaboard, NOAA has put out a warning to all shitting—to all shipping, that …
And I laugh, thinking of Shaylene, and how much she would have loved that one, it’s almost like they did it for her, those unseen typists. I can almost see her in my head, saying, it’s a WEATHER FORECAST. The CONTEXT. The CONTEXT.
I go to answer the door. As I do I pass a mirror and catch a glimpse of myself—pale, dark hair, looking nervous. But hopeful too, I think. It’s strange: it’s still true what I said to my (mom), that she stole my past from me, she took away my yesterdays.
But that’s okay. Because now I am a person made of tomorrows.
When I open the door, Jennifer is standing there, looking beautiful as always, as if someone, some omnipresent imp, goes around backlighting her wherever she walks, dusting her with freckles; there’s a cute little girl clinging to her legs, a pink clip in her hair—she looks happy, and I think, that could have been me, but then I push down the bitter thought.
Nice to see you again, says Jennifer, in sign. They’ve been learning, taking online classes. She leans forward, like she’s about to give me a kiss, on the cheek, but then she catches herself, puts her hand out instead. I take it and shake it. Our eyes meet at the same time, and she looks embarrassed, which makes me embarrassed too. The little girl raises her hands, and Jennifer picks her up.
Michael, who seems a tiny bit less like he’s going to have a coronary at every moment, though my guess is he still hits the scotch occasionally, holds out a bunch of flowers. He points to it, then to me, and hands them to me. He has a way to go, with the signing.
I don’t see Richie—
And then I do, as a boy with spiky hair comes tearing up the steps. He skids to a halt just as I sign “thank you” to Michael. He says something but he’s turned away from me so I don’t see.
Michael crouches down. You remember what we discussed? he says. And then the next bit is just [ ] to me, because I can’t see his lips.
I shake my head at him, like, don’t worry about it.
The boy frowns. He turns to me properly, like Michael has evidently just told him to do. Wow, he says. She really can’t hear, huh?
No, I say out loud, but I can read lips. I don’t know if his eyebrows shoot up because I spoke, or because of the sound of my voice, the weird tone I guess it probably has, but more and more I don’t care.
Cool! says Richie. Can you teach me?
Sure, I say.
He grins.
I want to learn too, says the girl, Victoria.
Of course, honey, I say.
She smiles, and Jennifer smiles. After lunch you can play with my dolls, Victoria says. She says it like she’s a queen and has just given me the keys to the kingdom.
I’d like that, I say.
There’s a tug on my sleeve.
Do you like baseball? asks Richie.
Michael glances at me, instantly awkward, but I smile at him to say, it’s okay. I mean, he’s competitive. So what? His wife and kids still love him. He doesn’t lock up children in prisons of ice. He doesn’t steal toddlers. Everyone has faults—get over it. I’m actually kind of looking forward to having a dad.
Instead of answering Richie, I go back into the hallway and get my bag, pull out my new DeMarini. I show it to him. His eyes go big like moons.
I point to the chalkboard that I keep by the door, and the chalk on the shelf next to it. I CAN talk, and I mind less now that people might think it sounds funny, but it still feels weird in my throat. Writing is more natural—at least till we can all sign properly, and with Jennifer, it won’t be long at all. I can believe, now, that she kept up the search for me, every day, kept up the media appearances and all that stuff. I can totally picture it. The woman is fierce.
Later, I’ll take you to the batting cage if you like, I write on the board. I show it to Richie, and he grins even wider.
Yes! he says. That would OWN.
I wipe the board and write:
:)
An image pops into my head then: the elks, all gaunt, their flanks just like this, like : )))). I hope the rain has fed the grass, in the Dreaming, and that the elks are eating and getting fat.
Something makes me erase the smiley and write, Do you ever have ice cream for dinner? I show it to Jennifer.
She frowns. No, why? she mouths exaggeratedly. That would be super unhealthy.
I shrug, like, no reason. And it’s cool. It’s totally cool. Everyone is different, you know?
There’s a moment of stillness. Then, to my surprise, Victoria makes this squirming movement, and her mom knows what it means because she puts the little girl down. Victoria rushes up to me.
My new sis—
She says, and the last part is lost to me because she’s hugging my legs, taking me completely by surprise, but it must be sister she must have said, my new sister. She looks up, her warm little arms still around my legs, and says,
I’m so glad you stopped being lost.
I feel tears prickling at the corners of my eyes and I smile down at her. I wonder if this is something her memory will preserve—this moment of looking up at me; me looking down at her. The smallness, the safety. It gives me a tingly feeling, the idea that I might end up in her childhood memories—it’s like a way of living forever. For a second I have a glimpse of time stretching out before me, time with this family, an endless series of moments, coming toward me one after another like waves at a beach, unstopping, unstoppable.
I crouch down and put my arms out and hug her back. And suddenly a memory comes to me—that time in the park with Shaylene, when I saw the family all together, and felt so much on the outside, like I would never have that, like it would always just be me and her. Like looking into a brightly lit room from the cold.
Now? Now I’m on the inside. I am within that fastness, that closed-off place, that brightness, and it might not be what I imagined but it’s not bad either.
I’m glad I’m not a bird, I think, floating around unanchored in the sky. I might not hear anything. But I have touch, I have feeling in my fingertips, and that means I have love. You can have almost anything taken from you, but unless you’re very, very unlucky, you’ll always have your sense of touch, and that means everything.
Do I smell burning? says Michael.
I stand back and let them in and Jennifer bustles past me, laughing,
to sort out the disaster in the kitchen, and I follow her, Richie holding my hand all of a sudden, like it’s completely natural, the most natural thing in the world, and all the time as I go down the hall with them, I’m thinking, it’s going to be okay. It’s totally going to be okay.
3…
I look out the taxi window when it stops, but all I see is mist.
I’ve been traveling for, like, six thousand hours, approximately. Two plane journeys, a fricking awful train that stopped in every godforsaken place in the middle of nowhere, and now this taxi ride. The driver is a man. I’m alone in a car with a man, and, yeah, I’m being cautious, I’m being alert, but I’m not scared. I like not being scared.
I’ve started carrying an iPad—it’s good for writing on really quickly. We’re here? I write. My finger traces the words on glass. It’s weird, how we spend so much time touching glass these days. I don’t know what it means, but I think it means something. Like, for thousands of years what people touched was fur and bone and wood. Then stone, for a long time also, flint mainly; and then metal. Plastic. And now glass. We are a people who spend much of our time looking through surfaces, into other depths and dimensions, and a lot of the things we touch are not real, but just symbols for other things, pictures.
We interact more with logos than we do with real things.
While I’m thinking this, the taxi driver is peering at the message I have written on the screen. He is a pale guy with receding hair and a beer belly. He laughs. Here is a big place, he says. But aye, this is what you wanted. And your hotel’s only a half hour walk back that way. He points back down the road, into the white mist.
How much? I write.
Two hundred pounds, he says, and I pay it, even though I’m sure he’s stiffing me. It makes me feel like a badass, peeling the money off the roll in my backpack. Fat stacks.
I get out, and now I can see a wooden fence and some grass in front of me.
The taxi driver leans out the window. Keep going straight ahead, he says. About two hundred yards. Mist’ll lift as the sun burns it off. It’s only the dew does it.
I walk, as the taxi turns around. I still have a slight limp—I really didn’t take care of myself after leaving the hospital. Maybe I’ll always have a limp.
I follow the fence, and the clumps of foliage along it. I can see the dim shapes of sheep, wreathed in mist like an aura, moving around slowly on the other side, chewing at the grass. After about two hundred yards, like the taxi driver said, the fence stops and I find myself walking into a field, pocked with holes, and with raised tufts of grass everywhere.
I stand, and I wait.
Sure enough, the sun slowly rises, and the mist slowly dissipates—the landscape has its eye half open, for the longest time, and then it very lazily opens it, and the valley reveals itself.
A mountain looms up in front of me, on the far side of a narrow, crystal clear lake, little gray stones on its bottom, as if the water wasn’t there at all, and you only know it is because the mountain is reflected in it, pointing downward, and usually, I mean generally, mountains point UP.
So: crystal water, shimmering stones, and two mountains, one going up and one going down; identical.
Purple heather spills down the mountainside, an improbable color, and around me are all the greens and browns of the hills, which flow either side of the mountain, to the distance, like wrinkled sheets. Craggy rocks and slopes of scree run down the mountainside, and the odd sheep clings to the incline.
There is no stag, right now, but I fully expect one to come along at any moment. I know it will. Because, in the end, how far is a stag from an elk? I don’t know if I took the elks from the stags on Shaylene’s cross-stitches, or if we were both being affected by Arizona, the place’s memory, like Coyote said. But now it seems to me those antlers have always been there, around me, in her pictures, in the Dreaming, in the handle of the knife Coyote gave me.
I stand there, and I wait for the elk to come.
Elk, stag, whatever.
And right now, I’m happy to wait. I have never seen anything like this place in my life. I said to the taxi driver, take me to the mountains, to a beautiful view. And I need a hotel. He just nodded, like it was a perfectly normal request. We drove all the way from Aberdeen.
I take a breath, drawing the air of the Scottish highlands into me, feeling it sucking into my bronchioles and then into my bloodstream, spinning. It’s cool and fresh and it smells like bracken and peat and crystal water, teeming with salmon. It tastes like the velvet smoothness of a stag’s antler, and the colors of the landscape in front of me may not be totally crazy like those cross-stitches that Shaylene used to do, but they ARE intense, as if the air is clearer, cleaner, and everything is made more vivid by it; brighter.
I was right.
It doesn’t look anything like the cross-stitches.
No.
It’s more beautiful.
It’s MORE.
Acknowledgments
As ever, my thanks go, in no particular order, to my wife, Hannah; my editors, Rebecca McNally and Cindy Loh; the ace agenting team of Caradoc King, Mildred Yuan, and Louise Lamont; and Will Hill, author and tireless Second Reader. All these people have improved the book immeasurably with their excellent and astute comments at various stages.
Okay, I lied. There is a bit of an order. But after Hannah, there is no order of importance.
Honestly.
Also by Nick Lake
In Darkness
Hostage Three
Copyright © 2015 by Nick Lake
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published in the United States of America in January 2015
by Bloomsbury Children’s Books
Electronic edition published in January 2015
www.bloomsbury.com
Bloomsbury is a registered trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
Permissions, Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 1385 Broadway, New York, New York 10018
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request
eISBN: 978-1-61963-441-1
To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters.
